This is part two of my series regarding a fully freeware APEX setup.

Post 1 coveres the installation of Oracle XE 11 beta on CentOS 5

Shut Down Apex-EPG

Log in as system into the XE database using SQL*plus. We must close the EPG within the database, because Tomcat is going to use the same port (8080)

execute dbms_xdb.sethttpport(0);

Tomcat installation

I took this from here.

su -
cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget 'http://www.jpackage.org/jpackage50.repo' yum update
yum install tomcat6 tomcat6-webapps tomcat6-admin-webapps
service tomcat6 start

Tomcat is running!

That was easy enough. We need to do some configuration.

If you get dependency errors please have a look at the original post

Firewall configuration

setup
"Firewall configuration"
"Customize"
"Other ports" 8080:tcp
"Ok"
service tomcat6 restart

Downloads: APEX Listener and APEX itself

Even though XE 11g is shipped with Apex preconfigured, for this setup we do need to link to the images folder. We do this by downloading the full Apex archive. At the same time we can allready download the listener as well:

Unzip Apex:

unzip apex_4.0.2.zip
unzip apex_listener.1.1.2.131.15.23.zip -d apex_listener

We only need the images folder from the apex distribution. Nevertheless it can come in handy when the full apex installer is available.

The Tomcat htmlroot (or docroot) is located at /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps.

We copy the apex and the listener installer files into the Oracle tree and create a symbolic link in tomcats’ webapps folder:

su -
mkdir $ORACLE_BASE/product/4.0.2
cp -r apex $ORACLE_BASE/product/4.0.2/apex/
ln -s $ORACLE_BASE/product/4.0.2/apex/images /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/i
mkdir $ORACLE_BASE/product/1.1.2
cp -r apex_listener $ORACLE_BASE/product/1.1.2/apex_listener

Tomcat configuration

Edit the /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml. We’re still root..

gedit /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml

replace the last line (having “</tomcat-users>”). Replace the username and password as desired.

  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <role rolename="admin"/>
  <role rolename="Manager"/>
  <role rolename="Admin"/>
  <user username="apex" password="verysecret" roles="manager,admin,Manager,Admin"/>
</tomcat-users>

It’s a bit silly that the roles are mentioned twice, but apparently not all implementations use the same casing.
I’m using the “apex” user here with the password “verysecret”

Save the file (Duhh 😉 )

Now we must make sure that Tomcat gets started at boot-time:

chkconfig --add tomcat6
chkconfig tomcat6 on
reboot

That should do the trick. So far for Tomcat for now.

Installing the APEX listener

First we need to unlock the “apex_public_user” and set its password. Open up the SQL*plus commandline and enter:

alter user apex_public_user account unlock;
alter user apex_public_user identified by the_secret_password;

Now open Tomcat manager: http://localhost:8080/manager/html. Go to the section: WAR file to deploy.

Click the browse button and select the warfile from /u01/app/oracle/product/1.1.2/apex_listener/apex.war

Click the “deploy” button.

Now you’re ready to configure the listener

Fully freeware APEX environment II: TomCat 6